Quote Originally Posted by Kazamoto View Post
I'm noticing an odd trend in this thread.

The people who type clearly, and politely, and with good grammar generally seem to have fond memories of FFXI's community.

The people who are snippy, sarcastic, rude, or just say "lol rose colored nostalgia glasses, ffxi was tehsuck" seem to have negative memories of FFXI's community.

Could it be that people with these negative experiences were perhaps deserving of the treatment they got?
LOL no. As I mentioned in my post, I stayed all the way up to Aht Urghan, which was about 2 1/2 to 3 years of FFXI during which I never once considered it's competitor World of Warcraft. My job with my school district left me with entire summers off to play and play I did. It was a great game for it's time and despite the exp grind, I had little complaints about the game design. It was the community and the fact that class elitism, MPKing and gilbuying were socially acceptable(though most people would still never admit to the last one)and anyone who claims such things didn't exist was likely among those who had friends in high places and never had to be on the receiving end. Either that or they played FFXI after they increased the cap, leveling became easier and people could solo Dynamis and most HNMs.

The long spawn windows and even longer respawn times made entire groups of players rabid to claim mobs over others and there was almost always drama on loot distribution afterwards. WHMs were abused for not having Erase when they were supposed to, despite every non-WHM charging 300k+ for it, many people wouldn't accept anything less than a Raise III because of the death penalty and on the other side of the coin, having to heal for anything other than the most unavoidable circumstances made all but the most brutally geared Paladins a less-than-optimal choice for tank in a majority of relevant encounters.

Pay attention to most threads concerning Binding Coil of Bahamut and you will see a lot of the same things going on here. Some classes through no fault of their own are already struggling to advance without their static raid groups because people discriminate based on what they think they know about someone else.